Looking across the landscape of contemporary culture

Evil

How do you represent evil in literature, art or film? Is it possible to get beyond the surface effects of evil to the malevolent heart, where choices are made and the fundamental moral drama is played out?

I’ve just finished reading Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock. (No, I haven’t seen the film yet – I was desperate to read the novel before seeing the film, so I’d come at it fresh and without knowing the ending.) It’s meant to be a study of evil, in the person of Pinkie, the teenage protagonist – but I’m not sure it works. [Minor plot spoilers follow]

He certainly does some terrible things, but he comes across to me more like a trapped animal than a moral agent. He’s heartless, he knows he’s doing wrong, but he doesn’t really know what the moral alternatives are as practical possibilities. He’s a bully, living off the strategies he learnt in the school playground. He’s constantly reacting, often with much cunning and forethought, but only once or twice does an almost metaphysical abyss open up before him, and the feint possibility of freedom become a reality.

This is from J.M. Coetzee’s introduction to the Vintage edition:

[In the person of Ida Arnold Greene creates] a stout ideological antagonist to the Catholic axis of Pinkie and Rose. Pinkie and Rose believe in Good and Evil; Ida believes in more down-to-earth Right and Wrong, in law and order, though with a bit of fun on the side. Pinkie and Rose believe in salvation and damnation, particularly the latter; in Ida the religious impulse is tamed, trivialised, and confined to the ouija board.

In the scenes in which Ida, full of motherly concern, tries to wean Rose away from her demonic lover, we see the rudiments of two world-views, the one eschatological, the other secular and materialist, uncomprehendingly confronting each other…

Rose’s faith in her lover never wavers. To the end she identifies Ida, not Pinkie, as the subtle seducer, the evil one. ‘She ought to be damned… She doesn’t know about love.’ If the worst comes to the worst, she would rather suffer in hell with Pinkie than be saved with Ida.

This last point is the most interesting aspect of the book: how love (however ambiguous) might bring you to want to be with someone in the depths of hell, rather than deny that love and lose them. But, in hell, wouldn’t you lose each other too? And are you really doing someone a favour by joining them on that road? Rose is worried that by choosing something ‘right’ (in Ida’s terms) it would be a betrayal of her relationship with Pinkie, of her faithfulness to him. It reminds me of Simone Weil, and her worry that to accept baptism would alienate her from all those who were not baptised.

5 Responses

Though I haven’t read Brighton Rock, it seems Graham Greene captures the meaning of evil in human lives and their circumstances from what Coetzee writes.
Evil can be such a grey area – not so for some and positively evil for others dependant upon their life circumstances, beliefs etc. Whilst there are things which are evil beyond argument others, for me, fall into that ambiguous area.

I have used this clip before but for this blog it is so worth showing again.

I once upon a time always struggled with my belief in an interventionist God , when I couldn’t believe in an interventionist devil. Just the evil of people.

How could this difference be, it made no sense to me what so ever.

But then I came to an understanding of things far deeper. Of how we are all connected, Of how we are all born from one, but almost like layers of diaphanous paper are separated by sin and wrong doing.

I also never quite understood the awesome power of prayer….. until that is, I realised the power of it intimately changing us as individuals from within. And of how that power is magnified and germinated, when people are praying for the right outcome collectively. And of how those prayers can change lives and situations around when we pray sincerely, and from a place of unyielding, deepest Love, we are met by God’s Love and ultimately His will.

The answer is not to stop Loving, but to Love more, even if that means by just showing an example to those who appear to behave in an evil way.

I can’t entirely get my head round all this, and I haven’t read the book. But what fascinates me is the inexorable path of love into the cross; and the periods, long or brief, when the ‘dark night’ can be bitter to the point of seeming to have a flavour of hell, notwithstanding accompanying varying joys and peace. I don’t really think that the circumstances that life deals us are what is interesting. I feel that what is interesting is the quality and courage of our pursuit of truth and love within those circumstances, (with sympathetic understanding extended to those withan an impoverished formation in love and truth). Love can lead into the depths of crucified love, but I don’t think that genuine love can ever lead into hell. Genuine love should not be confused with genuine sin. I think that those with an interest in adultery, as I understand Greene was, are ever apt to confuse the two.

“This last point is the most interesting aspect of the book: how love (however ambiguous) might bring you to want to be with someone in the depths of hell, rather than deny that love and lose them. But, in hell, wouldn’t you lose each other too? And are you really doing someone a favour by joining them on that road?”

Isn’t that exactly what Jesus did for us ? In unfaltering Love for us all, He went beyond the depths of hell, to save us.

And still He never stopped Loving.

I too have not read the book or seen the film. I agree with all your thoughts anna. Though I would suggest that your last comment rather reminds me of the penitent Mary Magdalene. Jesus’ Love for her, and her redemption, and the fact that her sole enduring Love for Him travelled beyond the crucifixion into eternity, is surely evidence enough that she most definitely was not ‘ever apt to confuse the two’

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Looking across the landscape of contemporary culture - at the arts, science, religion, politics, philosophy; sorting through the jumble; seeing what stands out, what unsettles, what intrigues, what connects, what sheds light. Father Stephen Wang is a Catholic priest in the Diocese of Westminster, London. He is currently Senior University Chaplain, based at Newman House Catholic Chaplaincy. [Banner photo with kind permission of Matthew Powell]

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